Prioleau Advisorshttp://prioleauadv.com
Strategic & M&A Advisory Services for the Location MarketTue, 21 Jul 2015 23:00:07 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3There goes HEREhttp://prioleauadv.com/archives/645
http://prioleauadv.com/archives/645#commentsTue, 21 Jul 2015 22:59:10 +0000http://prioleauadv.com/?p=645Although official announcements are not out, it sounds like the German Auto alliance formed between BMW, Daimler and Audi have won the bidding to Nokia’s HERE business. The reported price is €2.5B ($2.7B). Despite an active rumor mill, it’s not clear how spirited the bidding was or whether the German consortium ever had much competition other than from private equity companies.

There’s lots still to be learned about the deal but here are few things that I will be watching for:

What does “Open” mean?: A source in the WSJ was quoted as saying “The goal has always been to run the service as an open platform for everyone.” Open can mean many things. There is some indication that the service will be “open” to other users…meaning other car companies can put information in and presumably buy services. In HD auto maps, the more data, the better the real time accuracy. There may also be an open standard for the probe data brought into the car. HERE has already promoted that and it fits the same need as above. Will they say “Hey World, we’ve just spent $2.7B for this data and now we’re opening it up to you for free!”? Not likely.

How much of the digital map market will they address? Much has been made of the need of the German consortiums need to own “HD Maps”; that is the maps that will be needed for self-driving and autonomous cars. But HD Maps are pretty different animals from the maps that are needed for a mobile local search. Grossly simplifying, you can divide digital map use into three broad use cases:

Local Search Maps: Street geometries along with accurate POIs and addresses for good geocoding. This is used for local search.

“Basic” navigation and routing: The attributes needed to get a route from Point A to Point B. It adds in a lot more detail about road classifications, speed limits, turn restrictions, grade separations, etc. Still, it’s good enough to know “Turn left on Woodland Way”. You don’t need to know which lane you’re in. These are also largely static. They assume a driver is present and over-riding any instructions that don’t make sense in the real world.

HD Navigation: High precision, real time maps that are more focused on autonomous vehicles. These are not just more accurate versions of the basic navigation map. They require much higher precision and greater linkages with on-board sensors and high speed feedback loops to react to real time conditions. They take different technologies to capture data, new toolchains to process it and new systems to implement it in an autonomous vehicle. These get a lot of press. Revenues are…well, lagging.

As these maps have different characteristics, they also have different revenue models, market timing and required investments. While HERE had a mission to serve all these use cases (admittedly with a more recent emphasis on the first two), it’s not clear that the automotive consortium will have an interest in supporting the local search model. That’s the model that most of us use 90+ percent of the time when we use digital maps outside our car.

Who will support non-automotive users? HERE had done a nice job of building wins in the mobile/Internet market, counting Microsoft, Yahoo!, Amazon, Baidu, Facebook and others as customers of its map data and services. Those guys use HERE’s maps to compete with the giant in the local search market: Google. And Apple. If HERE goes all-auto, all the time, these guys have a problem. TomTom offers data but has lagged on mapping services. I don’t see any stopping open data maps from taking over the Local Search use case and soon the “Basic” navigation use case. The case is just too compelling and the gap closes daily. There’s a huge opportunity here for OpenStreetMap. And companies that provide mapping services based on OSM.

Will they drop the HERE name? Please.

Looking forward to these questions getting answered in the days ahead.

]]>http://prioleauadv.com/archives/645/feed0Happy Birthday GPShttp://prioleauadv.com/archives/635
http://prioleauadv.com/archives/635#commentsFri, 17 Jul 2015 07:21:13 +0000http://prioleauadv.com/?p=635The Global Positioning System turns 2o years old today. On July 17, 1995 GPS was declared fully operational, marking its official start as a positioning utility, provided free of charge by the US Government. Fourteen days later, on August 1, 1995, I started work at Trimble Navigation, running marketing for the OEM Division, my first day in my first job in the location business.

The “birthday” of GPS is somewhat misleading. GPS satellites had been deployed since 1978, but the constellation had not been fully populated or fully operational. By 1995, there was already a growing industry in surveying, marine and military. Trimble was a public company, having IPOed largely on the strength of military demand from the first Gulf war. The OEM division at Trimble was pioneering a relatively new concept: that there would be a business selling embedded GPS receivers into all manner of devices on an OEM basis.

Seems pretty obvious today but in 1995 it wasn’t. To start, no one knew what GPS was. If you tried to explain it to them at a cocktail party, they lost interest. Quickly. Trust me. The performance was horrible. The accuracy was intentionally degraded to 30m to protect US military superiority. It didn’t work except in full view of the sky. And a key spec was Time to First Fix (TTFF). The unit of measurement was minutes. You would literally stand there for several minutes before it could tell you where you were. And it was expensive. Our average selling price for a business-card sized printed circuit board was $250, which didn’t include the mandatory patch antenna. Power. Size. All issues.

Sounds promising? Actually it was, because for the first time, you could light up this device and locate yourself anywhere on earth. That was pretty cool. Even with the problems we had back then, you could see this revolutionizing the way things worked. There were a lot of things to be worked out and some major breakthroughs, including:

The iPhone…of course. Made GPS the norm in cell phones and showed app developers how to use it.

Complementary mapping, cloud computing and device technology to make it all work (not even gonna start that list).

And several others that I’m sure I will be reminded of (1).

In all, a pretty amazing and long journey. Today we use it daily, in almost any mobile application on the phone, in the car and increasingly in small connected sensors. We expect to know where we are, exactly, in sub-second time. We don’t even really think about it and are frustrated that it doesn’t follow us indoors with the same accuracy. It’s a long way from where it was 20 years ago.

So to all the folks that made it happen, I raise a glass and applaud your efforts. I have had the great privilege of knowing many of the people in the industry over the years. It is the consistent quality of the people in the industry and their ability to keep changing the game that keeps me coming back.

Happy Birthday GPS.

(1) I suspect many of those major breakthroughs happened in the years before 1995, but someone else is going to have to write that post.

]]>http://prioleauadv.com/archives/635/feed0Timing. Why the Mapbox raise is important now.http://prioleauadv.com/archives/623
http://prioleauadv.com/archives/623#commentsWed, 17 Jun 2015 15:14:51 +0000http://prioleauadv.com/?p=623Mapbox announced today that they’ve just raised $52.55 million in a Series B round. That gives the company the fuel to continue building out their platform. The investors come with great backgrounds to feed into the growth of the company. But I want to talk about timing.

This round comes at craziest time I have ever seen in the mapping sector, in fact the whole location sector. Every day new bidders surface for Nokia HERE. The investor boards on TomTom are burning up with a knock-on effect. All of this puts a lot of focus on OpenStreetMap, and a lot of focus now on Mapbox, a huge supporter of OSM and user of OSM data.

What is about to become clear is that Mapbox isn’t an OpenStreetMap company, it’s an open mapping platform. Last week in their office, I saw a team deploying a Mapbox map using HERE data on top of satellite imagery. A few weeks earlier, I saw new designs for TomTom with terrain base maps. Different data, same Mapbox designs. But it’s not just about basemap data. The variety of data sources in geo is exploding, driving a need for a new generation of maps. The pace is just going to increase as location-enabled sensors come on line. Ten years ago, maps were all about a navigation use case. We looked at streets, addresses, POIs, maybe a little traffic. That’s not true today. Today, it’s about imagery, social media, real time content and much more. And three years from now, there will be only more data.

Processing and merging geospatial data is insanely hard. It’s only going to get harder as we layer in more new data types. Each data type needs a platform that can merge, display and output that data into the many, many forms needed across mobile, automotive and desktop platforms. That’s why Mapbox is building a highly modular data pipeline and modular stack. They call these “building blocks.” They are distinct units, but can snap together like Lego to build new and unique applications as the market needs evolve.

I’ve been working closely with Eric on the board of Mapbox since pre-series A, watching the infrastructure pieces being diligently built out by an amazing team. What we are seeing today is just the start. As the number of data sources expand and location threads its way into every application, the modular building block approach will allow real disruptions that no one saw coming across many core industries.

No independent mapping company has had the resources to make this play since Google Maps wiped out the field ten years ago. That just changed.

All new technologies eventually settle out and become more known, more predictable and less dynamic. I keep thinking that that will happen to the geospatial market. But that’s not happening now. We are seeing exactly the opposite: As the collection of location tagged data become easier, as data processing becomes more sophisticated and as delivery options expand, this thing just gets hotter and hotter. And a bunch of fuel just got dumped on that fire.

Note: I am obviously a fan of Mapbox. Perhaps less obviously, I am also on the Mapbox Board of Directors.

]]>http://prioleauadv.com/archives/623/feed02007 Redux? Mapping back in playhttp://prioleauadv.com/archives/607
http://prioleauadv.com/archives/607#commentsSun, 10 May 2015 16:37:30 +0000http://prioleauadv.com/?p=607Buying and selling map companies is back in the news so I am back on Bloomberg. I really enjoyed this interview with Emily Chang and Cory Johnson on Bloomberg West. We covered a lot of ground and they had very good questions. My reference in the title refers to the year both major map companies were acquired, NAVTEQ by Nokia and TeleAtlas by TomTom. My prediction for 2015 (made and witnessed in January) was that 2015 would be a repeat of 2007; both HERE and TomTom Licensing would turn over again. I have high confidence that I will be at least half right and there’s a good chance I will be 100% right.

That said, a lot has changed since 2007, making this a more interesting situation. Consider the following (each worthy of a separate post):

In 2007, conventional wisdom was that no one would ever build another digital map of the world. It was too hard and too time consuming. Google and OSM disproved that, and there’s a least one more on the way…not counting ambitions of the Chinese giants like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.

The companies that acquired NAVTEQ and TeleAtlas underwent massive turmoil in their primary markets and in the mapping markets, wiping out most of the assumptions that they had in 2007. Nokia and TomTom’s main markets (mobile phones and PNDs) were crushed by competitors and alternatives. This hurt their ability to invest in their acquisitions at a time of significant market disruption. The loss in value of those acquisitions is well documented.

In LBS, paid services gave way to ad supported services, further changing the value propositions under which they made their investments. More positively, maps, location and location-based context have spread into every corner of the internet and mobile, making it truly an ever-present utility.

Changes in data collection, sensor availability, connectivity, cloud computing and data processing have radically changed the way maps are built and the economics of maintaining them. Companies built around old methods have been at a disadvantage to companies that took a fresh approach. There are plenty of the former and the latter in the mapping market.

Location-enabled understanding of a business, of consumers and of the marketplace is quickly becoming a core competitive asset for many, many companies. In 2007, this was mostly about navigation, at least in the consumer side. It was the only way any of us knew how to get paid. It is still about navigation but also so much more.

So while it may happen that the mapping companies undergo ownership transition again in 2015, that doesn’t mean that this is 2007 all over again. It will be interesting to watch. This HERE story is certainly generating a lot of rumors.

Last, thanks for the kind, witty, snarky and perceptive commentary coming out of the interview. It makes me appreciate anew the community around mapping and location. I hope to walk humbly, knowing that there are many, many great Mapping Girls and Guys out there with greater insight and knowledge.

]]>http://prioleauadv.com/archives/607/feed0Is this the start of a mapping war?http://prioleauadv.com/archives/598
http://prioleauadv.com/archives/598#commentsThu, 05 Mar 2015 18:29:49 +0000http://prioleauadv.com/?p=598I was on Bloomberg West on March 4, 2015, the day after the acquisition of deCarta by Uber hit the news. Cory Johnson’s opening question (cut off in the video) was “Is this the start of a mapping war?”. It’s a good question and provoked a (hopefully) interesting discussion.

Outside of personal interest (I was employed at deCarta six years ago), the two things that interest me about this deal are that Uber didn’t think that they could differentiate their offering in the way they wanted by using a consumer-oriented map API from Google and that owning the location stack is key to capturing user behavior data.

On the latter point, I am seeing a strong industry wide recognition of this: five years ago we viewed data flow as one directional: from the content to the user. Now the data that flows from the user back to the service provider is just as critical, whether for developing better routes, tuning search results or developing a better understanding of context. I’m thinking through a post on that topic and would love any thoughts.

Big news for the day in the geo-world: Uber bought deCarta, the long-time LBS platform company that at times powered the likes of Google, Yahoo!, NIM, TeleNav, TomTom and many more. In their statement, Uber states that they “will continue to fine-tune our products and services that rely on maps — for example UberPOOL, the way we compute ETAs [estimated times of arrival], and others — and make the Uber experience even better for our users.” This is also the first announced acquisition by Uber. Terms were not announced but it is suspected that Uber’s war chest of $5.9B raised remains largely intact.

(Disclaimer: I worked at deCarta six years ago and am a shareholder under non-disclosure. Sorry, no secrets here.)

A couple observations about the deal:

deCarta has what Uber needs: Uber is about cars and drivers and getting people (and someday things) places. That puts an emphasis on maps, but specifically on the navigation, routing and geocoding technologies that sit under the “maps” umbrella. A couple of those technologies, notably routing and geocoding are hard to do. The basics are easy but the exceptions drive you nuts. Further, they are technologies where it is hard to differentiate to the positive; You can route someone correctly 99 times but they will remember the one time you mis-routed them until they die. deCarta’s geocoding and routing have been optimized over many countries, customers and years. Uber bought some key technologies that are hard to build and hard to perfect.Uber is not content with generic geospatial functionality: Uber had been using Google Maps which are very good, but built for multiple use cases. Your routing is good but no different from the routing that anyone else gets. Uber wants to be able to build competitive advantage through routing that is better, more flexible and more customized for their applications. Think about UberPOOL: Yeah, you go from Point A to Point B, but now you pick up passengers at Points C and D. Owning the routing algorithms allows Uber to tailor the routing to their needs. Anand Babu wrote a very timely article about what this means just a week ago.Uber wants to own their location assets: While I was at deCarta, I lived through the disruption that Google caused in the mapping industry. At the height of this, Bill Gurley of Benchmark used this as a case study on disruptive tactics in an article called “Google redefines Disruption: The Less Than Free Business Model“. It’s worth a read. many thought that Google would eventually be the only mapping game in town, especially after Apple’s initial missteps in maps. But I think Uber’s move here is part of a larger trend I am seeing, especially among the big mobile and Internet players; they don’t want to rely on Google for maps. They want to own that themselves. Several reasons:

They want to differentiate their product. For Uber that might mean routing, but it could equally mean differentiation in delivering search results, in a style and look that matches their brand, in new functionality around data visualization and display or maybe they just want something that doesn’t look like all the other maps out there. Again, Google maps are a great property, but it delivers the same service to all, with no opportunity to differentiate.

Google is a competitor: It’s hard to identify a vertical market that Google may not compete in someday, but this is certainly true for social networks, local search, travel, real estate, hotels, automotive applications and many other areas where Google has used its mapping assets as a wedge to break open markets. The logic of using an asset from someone who is trying to steal your business is…problematic.

They want to own the location assets: This topic was discussed at length when Apple launched its maps. Despite the well-documented issues there, most agreed that it was a worthwhile investment, because Apple, wanting to control the mobile experience, couldn’t rely on an outside company for a critical mobile asset like maps. <update>There are several reasons for this but the one that is emerging is that the data collected from users about where they are, what they are doing, where there’s traffic and more is all valuable context for tailoring services. </update> If that’s true for Apple, it is true for the many other big players in mobile and internet who have the resources and the aspirations to want to roll their own. Frankly, I am surprised it’s taken this long, but those wheels are turning.

Uber made a good move. This acquisition will accelerate their ability to uniquely define their service. Many congratulations to Kim Fennell and the team at deCarta. Looking forward to seeing great things at Uber. <update>When Google launched in 2005, they were built on deCarta’s platform. As they grew and extended their capability, they needed more control over their destiny and replaced deCarta’s platform with their own. Ironically, Uber is doing the same thing now by buying deCarta. </update>

Last thought: It took Google ten years to get where they are now. Apple has been at it since 2008…seven years. Companies sitting on the fence need to assess their strategy and get after it. I suspect we will see more deals like this in the next year.

3/4/15: Minor edits after I slept on it

]]>http://prioleauadv.com/archives/589/feed0IFTTT has a better geo strategy than Twitterhttp://prioleauadv.com/archives/580
http://prioleauadv.com/archives/580#commentsWed, 29 Oct 2014 21:42:10 +0000http://prioleauadv.com/?p=580I just added a new recipe on IFTTT that sends me a message whenever someone sends a tweet within a specified radius. They bill it as a neighborhood tweet watch but it could obviously be used to watch for tweets within any area or place. Right now it used a simple point-and-radius geofence but presumably that could be extended into any sort of bounding box.

I mentioned that I’d added this and got a number of responses including a comment fromArjun Ram that suggested that IFTTT’s geo strategy is better than Twitter’s. It raises the question of whether Twitter does in fact have a geo strategy and why they’ve been so slow in doing anything in that area. After an early acquisition of the geo-team at Mixer Labs in 2009, they’ve not really done much. Not only has Twitter been slow to encourage location tagging of tweets that could benefit (something like 2-3 % of all tweets have a location tag), they’ve not even deployed simple tools to allow location filtering of those tweets that are geotagged. Now IFTTT has done it.

Maybe it’s just not a priority. But it seems like there would be some useful applications. For instance:

Monitor tweets about a sporting event or concert only from people at the venue.

Monitor tweets along a route to detect traffic incidents. With a little creative UX design, you could make a driver friendly crowd-sourced traffic and road condition similar to Waze.

Local businesses could monitor for people who were close by and sent out a hashtag about what they wanted (#lunchdeals) and respond with an offer.

News, public safety or marketing companies could monitor public places for increases in twitter activity that might give early warning of a spontaneous event or unusual occurrence happening there. This would take some serious data munging to establish baselines activity from which anomalies could be detected.

Those may not all be good ideas but they’re just a few I though of in 10 minutes. The point is that it seems like the Twitter Firehose has a vast amount of information some of which is usefully tied to location. I’m surprised that Twitter has not done more to make something useful out of it.

]]>http://prioleauadv.com/archives/580/feed0TomTom goes online.http://prioleauadv.com/archives/553
http://prioleauadv.com/archives/553#commentsTue, 14 Oct 2014 17:00:51 +0000http://prioleauadv.com/?p=553Interesting press release out of TomTom today: The Dutch PND and map maker announced that they have “extended (their) location-based services product portfolio with an online turn-by-turn navigation service”. That means that they are adding server-based navigation; a feature that is offered by competitors like Nokia HERE and Google but, until now, not by TomTom. The release also says “In support of this product line extension TomTom has expanded its relationship with deCarta.”

Hmm…that’s a little cryptic.

Here’s what that means: TomTom has been a supplier of Personal Navigation Devices (aka: PNDs, GPS, SatNav) for years. They also have a map dataset (from their 2007 acquisition of TeleAtlas) that they license to many customers, notably Apple. They have build connected services for traffic data. What they haven’t had is off-board (or on-line as they call it) navigation, server-based navigation that is the standard for Google, Apple and arch-rival Nokia HERE. That’s something they need to compete in connected cars, in mobile and in the coming Internet of Things market. Now they are dealing with that gap…and they are using deCarta’s platform to do it.

It’s a needed and overdue step for TomTom. It’s also a big win for deCarta.

Disclaimer: I am a past employee of deCarta, from about 5 years ago.

What’s new?

deCarta and TomTom have been “partners” for a long time, in the sense that deCarta has used TomTom data with its LBS platform to offer these types of solutions to their own customers. What’s new in this announcement is that TomTom will now be selling these services under their brand as a mapping service. The release positions the agreement in the context of navigation services but if its built on deCarta’s platform, they would also have access to other components like local search and geocoding. Potentially, that gives TomTom the ability to sell online mapping services directly in competition with Nokia HERE, going after large mobile and Internet players who don’t want to (or can’t) use Google’s maps. That’s new for them.

Why do we care?

The map data licensing side of TomTom (acquired as TeleAtlas in 2007) has been at a disadvantage to HERE because it could only offer the map data; not the services that turn those maps into valuable application assets for most developers. In 2007, the location market was primarily about commercial data providers selling through third-party LBS platform providers to commercial application developers. That’s changed: commercial map data owners have moved to offering that data through API based LBS platforms, making the data easier to use for developers.

Look at the competition.

In 2004, Google Maps started as an application layer (on deCarta’s platform and TeleAtlas’ data, in fact), but quickly moved to integrate vertically, first building its own platform and eventually its own map database. Google did not integrate to save money; they did it to own the stack and get the resulting flexibility, consumer data, map corrections and scalability that they could not have gotten working through partners.

Nokia HERE took longer but eventually made the same decision, transforming itself from primarily a map data company to a map platform company, merging their Ovi platform with NAVTEQ maps and offering LBS services to many large internet platforms such as Yahoo!, Amazon, Samsung and others. More recently, they have emphasized a Connected Car platform to offer service to the Auto OEMs. That move impacts more than just technology: it disrupts your eco-system, turning past partners into possible competitors. At the time, I spoke with Michael Halbherr (until recently HERE’s GM) and got the feeling that while it was hard, there was no choice…not if HERE wanted to stay relevant, offering up-to-date services that could compete with Google. Halbherr’s recent departure casts some doubt on their strategy but not on their commitment to an online platform model.

Which left TomTom with a business model that was out of step with its competitors. TomTom has talked about a location platform but hasn’t had anything that made much of an impact in the market.

This deal gets them there. By partnering with deCarta, TomTom can now offer a cloud-based solution, at scale, internationally for its customers. deCarta’s experience in navigation is a good fit for TomTom’s base and the local search capability will help in the commercial and mobile markets. The press release makes no mention of automotive customers but if this solution doesn’t go in that direction, they will need another just like it to compete with Google, Apple and HERE.

Good thing?

So this is a good thing, but I wonder if it will be good enough. Part of the reason to build the complete link between geodata and the consumer is to deliver maps, search results and geo-information to that consumer. But increasingly, the other reason is to get information back from the user…about map errors, about traffic, about search patterns and about personalized context about those users that helps to improve the service. Competitors are moving fast to mapping solutions that can adapt to a changing world and to different users and contexts. Unless this partnership includes a way to collect and use that data return path, it will continue to be at a disadvantage, certainly to HERE and Google.

Thoughts?

]]>http://prioleauadv.com/archives/553/feed0No Map Love at WWDC 2014.http://prioleauadv.com/archives/541
http://prioleauadv.com/archives/541#commentsMon, 02 Jun 2014 21:25:08 +0000http://prioleauadv.com/?p=541Before today’s WWDC, there were a lot of hints that there would be some big announcements from Apple on new features for maps as part of the iOS8/Yosemite launch. Most of the speculation was on transit routing, including a pretty detailed review from 9to5Mac, complete with screen shots. So I watched the Tim & Craig show from start to finish, and here’s what I saw: Nothing.

That’s not strictly true. In fact you saw a lot of quick shots of maps integrated into many of the new things that Apple did announce: maps in Notifications, Calendars, Messenger, Family Sharing, Photos and probably a few others that snuck in while my attention lagged. That by itself says something: Maps are a utility that will be threaded throughout the Apple applications. That’s not new; Google has been doing that on its services for a while but it did come though in the presentation. But there was no big news, no big feature or even any real mention of maps at all (except a weird nod to maps in China at the very end).

That’s a little surprising given that Apple has been making a big push on maps for the last year. Five of their thirteen acquisitions in 2013 were in mapping and location technologies (if you count Broadmap) and they have consistently had a pretty staggering set of job reqs posted for engineers in the Apple Geo team. And they’ve been hiring some pretty good people. So I was surprised not to see anything at WWDC. What are all those people doing over there anyway?

Since Apple never tells me anything, I can only guess. Here are my guesses:

“Hey, We’ve fixed this” doesn’t play at WWDC: Two years ago, Apple famously over-promised and under-delivered on maps at WWDC. Since then, they have done a really good job of correcting many of the issues with data. Two of their acquisitions were aimed at this as were a lot of the hires they have made. Today, Apple maps work well. I’d argue that Google still wins in search and geocoding but Apple has a very nice product. But pointing out that the basic stuff works now isn’t good theatre and WWDC is nothing if not theatre. (Note: I hear rumblings about the data overseas…I am not sure if non-US users would agree that it is “fixed”.)

“We’ve got that too” doesn’t play either: I suspect Apple is coming out with transit routing (courtesy of Hopstop and Embark team/tech), but why highlight a feature that you were roundly criticized for not having and just now come out with…especially if it only gets you parity with your competitor? Transit routing should have been in v1.0 instead of Flyover. Coming out with it two years late doesn’t get you many points unless you do something dramatically better. From the previews, it doesn’t.

They don’t have anything to say on their own data…yet: I believe that Apple is at a competitive disadvantage to Google because they don’t own their own data. In just one example, Mike Blumenthal detailed the time it takes for Apple to correct map data (working through their data supplier) vs Google (one year vs two weeks). Given the resources Apple is putting into Geo, I think they will address this some day. But today was not the day.

Ultimately, it remains to be seen if Apple views maps as an area where they can establish competitive advantage or if they are just shooting for “good enough”. There is a case for good enough. Usage numbers show that if the default map is serviceable, it will get a lot of users just by being the default. Most people just don’t download an alternative unless they need to. That’s important because it means that they don’t need to be in the arms race with Google. It allows Apple to offer maps as a utility for all those other properties where it popped up in today’s talk. It will also be important to have a good navigation experience in order for CarPlay to be effective, but I think their nav app has been good since day 1 (once you get the destination right). Unlike Google, Apple doesn’t need to drive a compelling local search experience off their maps. Maybe good enough is good enough.

But they’re hiring some really good people and putting a lot into maps. I don’t think you attract those people to a vision of building a good-enough product. I still believe (hope, maybe) that there is more to come from the Apple Geo team, if not at WWDC 2014, at some event in the future.

]]>http://prioleauadv.com/archives/541/feed0Where does HERE go?http://prioleauadv.com/archives/517
http://prioleauadv.com/archives/517#commentsTue, 03 Sep 2013 13:46:24 +0000http://prioleauadv.com/?p=517I thought that this graphic was pretty funny but it implies that the Microsoft acquisition of Nokia’s handset business is no big deal. That’s not the case. It is a big deal in that these two companies at one time dominated their industries and now they’re struggling to be relevant. It’s a big deal in that it is effectively the end of Nokia as we’ve known it.

It’s not a big deal for me in that I swore many years ago that I’d never buy another Microsoft phone and have no reason to think that will change.

As you might guess, I am more interested in what remains of Nokia, and especially the NAVTEQ/HERE business. I am also interested in why these guys can’t find the Caps Lock key but that’s another blog.

My take:

The new Nokia has a mapping platform, a network equipment business and patents. That makes no sense. HERE will get spun off which is what people there have wanted for a while. It rids them of the boat anchor that was the handset business.

The HERE/Microsoft arrangement remain largely unchanged. HERE had been powering Bing maps and will continue to do so, secured by a four year deal.

HERE will position itself as an independent mapping platform, for people who can’t use Google and are scared to build their own (having seen Apple’s struggles). nFor example, it would be much more palatable for Samsung to use HERE now that they aren’t a handset competitor.

HERE will continue to push into the platform business as evidenced by their new automotive platform. This move will help them as they expand their value proposition but will also turn yesterday’s customers into tomorrow’s competitors. Hardware vendors will be reluctant to use a cookie-cutter HERE platform that doesn’t allow them to differentiate services. Reference Microsoft and IBM in the Personal PC space, circa 1990.

TomTom will lose a competitive edge it has had by bashing HERE as the competition. For instance, it is more likely that HERE could compete with TomTom for map data business at Apple now.

OSM will be a winner. That’s a longer story but I believe that the gap between Google and HERE will grow and companies will need an alternative map data source. I see more corporate adoption of OSM in the next years, which will make the map better which will make it a better option. That blog is swirling in my head and I hope to write it soon.